Tag: Crowdstart Capital

8 years after Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 PapaJohn’s pizzas, 1,000 participants of the DAHO.AM Pure Tech Conference each paid 300 CrowdstartCoins XSC for conference T-shirts, goodie bags or frozen yogurt. 30 degrees Celsius and more made especially the frozen yohurt the most sought after food at the conference.

Datarella supported the organizational DAHO.AM team with looking for speakers, defining workshops and also with the more nitty gritty detail of a conference. Additionally, we launched our latest blockchain product at the conference, a cryptocurrency wallet, the XSC Wallet.

When opening the XSC Wallet, each DAHO.AM visitor got 1,000 XSC that enabled her to buy a t-shirt, a goodie bag and a frozen yogurt. Due to the tough conference schedule and summery temperature, many visitors asked other visitors who weren’t interested in goodie bags, to send them their XSC enabling them to buy another froyo. Sending and receiving crypto with tye XSC Wallet proved to be so easy that even the least technically educated (their words) experienced no problem at all managing their cryptocurrency.

Some visitors were hesitant to spend their XSC in the first instance, since they belong to the #HODL group – users who don’t spend their frypto but “Hold On for Dear Life”. But, after the Crowdstart team assured them that they woult get the same amount of XSC tokens they’d spend later this week in real ERC20 XSC tokens that are tradeable on the Ethereum mainnet, they went on a shopping tour.

The fascinating result of the XSC Wallet launch was the fact that all users were completely surprised how easy it is to pay for goods and food with cryptoin real life. The payment process is easy to understand, fast, and makes so much fun that many visitors returned several times to the Crowdstart stand only to use the XSC Wallet and pay for stuff, again. For the Datarella team, this wasn’t really a surprise, but a very nice confirmation of our strong belief that crypto will play a major role in global payments soon.

We want blockchain technology to live up to its original concept: being and staying an open, free technology. We want to prevent blockchain technology from the fate of the internet, being corrupted by lobby groups who succeeded in persuading the U.S. government to abolish net neutrality in December 2017.

For millennia, sovereignty defined currency. Governments created curency and the currency allowed a government to execute its monopolistic control. Now, people create currency. And since currency creates sovereignty, the former equation has been inversed: economic freedom is no longer dependent on governments but can be exerted in a trans-national, self-determined way.

Blockchain developers of all sorts, be it Bitcoin maximalists, Ethereum proponents, IOTA tangle enthusiasts, Stellar developers or active supporters of currencies such as Monero, Dash, etc, – all of them will be awarded CrowdstartCoins for committing valuable code. Two weeks after having issued the first CrowdstartCoins to developers participating at the IOTA hackathon in Gdansk, CrowdstartCoins have been distibuted to over 125 developers, most of them working on IOTA and Ethereum.

CrowdstartCoin can become the currency of choice for all those who work on blockchain technology. When CrowdstartCoin is widely adopted in and used by the Blockchain community, its value supports the future development and the evolution of the Blockchain ecosystem at-large.

If you’re a developer who committed code to advance Blockchain technology at-large, you’ll be eligible to receive CrowdstartCoins. You can request CrowdstartCoins by filling out the Developer Incentive Program: Claim XSC Rewards form.

We are very happy that, ten days after having issued the first XSC to IOTA developers at IOTA hackathon, in Gdansk, the tokens have been officially listed on EtherDelta! From today, blockchain developers can grow the value of their own token that serves as a reward for contributing to the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem!

The final decision has been made: We will not ICO with Crowdstart Capital. After having worked on the preparation of a token sale based out of Germany several months we’ve reached the conclusion that such an ICO is not advisable at this time.

Two issues have been the decisive factors: First, an ICO based out of Germany would have to be done in the environment of a legal limbo. Other project teams may decide to take the risk of selling a virtual currency to professional and/or individual investors in Germany but we’ve decided that the regulatory uncertainty and risk is too high. With our parent company Datarella, we have built a solid brand reputation within the blockchain ecosystem and we are not willing to put this at risk.

Second, we think that we can better meet our goal of contributing to the blockchain community by giving our Crowdstart Coins away. Instead of selling tokens to investors and using this cash to provide blockchain-based startups with consulting, services and solutions, we will reward Crowdstart Coins (XSC) to developers who add valuable code to the blockchain ecosystem.

We gained this insight to change our model while working on the cryptoeconomics; i.e. the inventive mechanism within a specific community. Finally, we have come up with a 3-step-process of distributing Crowdstart Coins – “XSC” – to the blockchain community:

In the first phase, we will distribute tokens to developers at conferences, events and hackathons. This activity will occur primarily in Europe and the distribution will be at the discretion of CSC. The goal of this phase is to get tokens into the hand of active developers and blockchain early adopters/enthusiasts.

Developers committing code to key blockchain projects can opt-in to receive XSC tokens for every line of code that is accepted for their respective projects. CSC will set up a smart-contract-based system that will pay out tokens according to the accepted commits. CSC will programmatically monitor the git repos of major projects.

In the third phase, members of the community will be able to suggest projects to be included in the incentive scheme, a model known as liquid feedback. Token-based ballots will be used to enable community voting and determine which blockchain projects should be included.

In this phase, we’ll also be rewarding developers to contribute to our code base. Essentially, over the course of the three phases of the incentive program, it should morph from being a mostly manual process to a fully automated process.

If you’re a developer who committed code to advance Blockchain technology at-large, you’ll be eligible to receive XSC tokens. You can request XSC by filling out the form:

Crowdstart Capital (CSC) seeks to support the developer community and the blockchain ecosystem at-large. This document seeks to clarify specifically what these terms mean as well as outline several options for supporting our goals in this area. First, we define the target audience:

Developer Community: We define the developer community broadly including:

Active professional developers

Computer science and university STEM students

Potential future developers

Software companies

Open source software development organizations

Software startups

Blockchain Ecosystem: This term refers to various blockchain technologies as well as all the technologies that support and connect these projects. Here we are using the word blockchain as a catch-all for all distributed ledger technologies including block-less tech such as the IOTA Tangle:

Core Blockchain Protocols: i.e. Ethereum, Monero, Neo, Qtum, Polkadot

Selected dApps (decentralized applications)

Supporting and connecting technologies: Atomic swaps,

multisig, hardware and lite wallets, governance protocols, etc.

Alternative protocols directed at a specific segment, such as IOTA for IoT

Exchange and liquidity services

Blockchain derivatives

CSC = Crowdstart Capital, a brand of Datarella GmbH, Munich

XSC = Tokens, originally provided by Crowdstart Capital

After having defined the target audience, we will create the incentive scheme in three consecutive steps:

Phase 1 – Initial Token Distribution

In the first phase, we will distribute tokens to developers at conferences, events and hackathons. This activity will occur primarily in Europe and the distribution will be at the discretion of CSC. The goal of this phase is to get tokens into the hand of active developers and blockchain early adopters/enthusiasts.

Potential Venues for XSC Distribution

Blockchain-related conferences

Hackathons

Incubator events

Blockchain meetups

In all of these contexts, different amounts of tokens will be made available for various levels of community participation. A wide variety of people will be rewarded for their community participation. Some types of participation could be more highly valued than others. The winners of a competition for building a new type of dApps at a hackathon might receive significantly more XSC than the bulk of the participants. However, the idea is that most types of contribution should result in earning some XSC tokens.

Exemplary reasons for being awarded tokens

Prizes for the winners of hackathon events

Honorarium for development event speakers

Bonus for event participants

Bonus for webinar participants

Bonus for participants travelling long distances to attend events

In order to collect tokens at, for example, an event, all you need is to have an Ethereum wallet which supports ERC20 tokens. During events, we will collect the relevant public keys and distribute tokens live to the participants. After that, participants can trade or hold their tokens or use them to purchase discounted consulting services from CSC. For more information on using XSC tokens to purchase discounted consulting services, please see http://crowdstart.capital.

During Phase 1, tokens may also be awarded outside of events to reward individual contributions to the overall blockchain community. The point here is to get tokens into a wide variety of people’s hands and incentivize participation in building the local development community.

Phase 2 – Smart-Contract-Based Token Distribution

Developers committing code to key blockchain projects can opt-in to receive XSC tokens for every line of code that is accepted for their respective projects. CSC will set up a smart-contract-based system that will pay out tokens according to the accepted commits. CSC will programmatically monitor the git repos of major projects.

The Process

Developers sign up on our website with their GitHub username and a public key for an Ethereum wallet. In order to ensure that those people actually doing the development work are also the people who get the token rewards, developers will also have to post their public key in their public GitHub profile.

Once registered, developers just need to do what they do best: Code! For every line of code accepted to one of our registered and monitored projects within the blockchain ecosystem, CSC will transfer tokens to the author of the code. CSC also reserves the right to transfer bonus tokens to developers who solve particularly pressing bugs or issues or who contribute significantly to certain features.

Additional Actions Earning Tokens

Referrals: Developers who refer other developers to the incentive program

Commits to documentation/wikis

How-to’s or blog posts associated with official project documentation

The exact number of tokens that each action will earn is not determined exactly, yet. Project code will likely be rewarded with more tokens than pure documentation for example, but all accepted commits are eligible for earning tokens. Obviously, good documentation and stability of key blockchain projects needs to be improved in order to bring the blockchain ecosystem closer to enterprise-readiness.

CSC will start with providing incentives for development of Ethereum because it is the biggest and most widely accepted blockchain with a Turing-complete programming language. This said, it is also under-documented and could definitely use further support in order to progress and become an enterprise-ready solution. The second blockchain project whose development will be awarded with XSC tokens is IOTA, because of its assumed aptitude for IoT-related projects.

In Phase 3, CSC will incorporate a mechanism for electing new projects to be supported. This mechanism will be based on a liquid feedback model enabling a contemporary scalable, decentralized decision making.

Phase 3 – Liquid Feedback Mechanism

In the third phase, members of the community will be able to suggest projects to be included in the incentive scheme, a model known as liquid feedback. Token-based ballots will be used to enable community voting and determine which blockchain projects should be included.

In this phase, we’ll also be rewarding developers to contribute to our code base. Essentially, over the course of the three phases of the incentive program it should morph from being a mostly manual process to a fully automated process.

One essential part of this phase is that developers will be incentivized heavily to build the secondary smart contract which will continuously monitor the GitHub accounts for commits and facilitate voting.

The kick-off event for this blockchain ecosystem incentive scheme will be the IOTA Hackathon in Gdansk, Poland, 17-19 November, 2017. There, we will award IOTA developers XSC tokens for committing code to the main branch and for other valuable inputs. The IOTA hackathon provides the ideal event for the initial distribution of XSC since during this 2,5-day get-together the Crowdstart Capital team and the hackathoe’s participants can perfectly define and decide on the value of the inputs to the blockchain and, henceforth, on the amount of to-be-earbned XSC tokens.